Advances in microprocessor related technology have lead to widespread development and the adoption of computing devices. Computing powers that used to be available only in expensive mainframe computers requiring special operating environments are now available in many personal-computing devices. The form factors vary from desktop, laptop, palm sized and so forth. A number of these computing devices are packaged as “purpose” devices, such as set top boxes, entertainment personal digital assistants (“PDA”), pagers, text messengers, smart appliances and wireless mobile phones.
Concurrently, advances in networking, telecommunications and related technologies, in particular, in the area of wireless networking/communications, have lead to increased connectivity between computing devices, over local, private, wide area, and/or public networks. Of particular notoriety is the Internet.
Together, these and other related factors contributed to the availability of rich content and functionality available from a variety of server devices for consumption and/or application on a variety of client devices. Recently, this trend of connected consumption/application of content and services has made significant advances in the home operating environment.
To facilitate interchangeability and ease of employment of a wide range of devices to interact with such content and services, the UPnP networking and a number of related technologies are being developed by members of the UPnP Forum. These specifications specify the protocols and services to be supported by UPnP devices in UPnP networks.
However, these specifications do not specify the user interface through which UPnP client devices will interact with UPnP servers. Furthermore, there is no indication of how UPnP client devices will obtain appropriate user interfaces through which their operations are to be controlled.